One of the pieces of evidence skeptics
cite to claim that Flight 77 could not have hit the Pentagon is that
the plane's incredibly low altitude would have thrown people and cars
around the highway on the approach path like rag dolls by means of wake
turbulence. How accurate is this assumption?

The scope of this short article is
to raise questions, not debunk either side of the argument.

Wake turbulence is a problem for air
traffic controllers and they have to schedule landings and take-offs
carefully to ensure that planes do not adversely affect each other's
balance by means of vortices created by wake turbulence. Wake turbulence
takes around two minutes to clear.

Photographs and eyewitness accounts
are consistent with the plane having an altitude of around 20 feet and
traveling at 530 miles an hour, clipping lamp posts as it descended
towards the Pentagon.

Many skeptics point to the 1999 movie
Pushing Tin as an example of the effects of wake turbulence. At the
end of the film, the main characters, played by Billy Bob Thornton and
John Cusack, stand beneath a large commercial airliner as it comes in
to land. The plane passes overhead and then lands on the runway, at
which point both men are lifted up into the air and tossed a significant
distance off to the side of the runway.

While a movie scene created by special
effects can by no means be held up as empirical scientific evidence
of the effects of wake turbulence it can at least be accepted that such
a big budget production would go to great lengths to accurately portray
what would happen.

Therefore it's salient to note that
the two men are only thrown off the runway when they are in direct line
of sight with the engines of the plane (after or just as the plane is
landing) and are not affected when the plane is overhead.

So is it reasonable to conclude that
wake turbulence is not going to cause significant problems for any object
or person standing a reasonable distance below a jetliner?

Many point to the clipping and downing
of lamp posts as evidence of the object's incredulous altitude. The
damage of the lamp posts is consistent with a jetliner having a wingspan
of over 100 feet, as can be seen in this illustration. A Boeing 757 has a wingspan
of 125 feet.

Should cars and people have been tossed
around the highway if a large commercial airliner whizzed by 20 feet
above their heads?

Look at this photograph of a KLM Royal
Dutch Airlines Boeing 747 (click to enlarge) coming in to land at St.
Maarten-Princess Juliana Int'l Airport in the Netherlands. The photographer
claims the plane only cleared the fence by about 10 feet and we can
estimate that it is not more than 30 feet above the people stood on
the beach, yet there is no sign of waves or even sand plumes being lifted
off the ground by any wake turbulence caused by the aircraft.

This is a photograph of an American
Airlines 757-200, the exact same model as Flight 77, flying over the
same beach. Though the aircraft appears slightly higher than the KLM
jet, one would expect air traffic controllers would compensate for an
unusually low approach angle and be satisfied that any wake turbulence
would not under any circumstance throw people around the beach.

Here is another shot of a Boeing 757.
Again, not even grains of sand are affected by the low approach. Click
any of these photos for enlargements.

Here is another example.

One eyewitness claims that the object
that hit the Pentagon was just six feet off the ground as it clipped
a generator and even a car antenna before impacting on the building.
In this instance one would surely expect the wake turbulence to have
some affect and photographs do show the
damaged generatorimmediately in front of the building.

While further confirmation will obviously
be necessary in closing the case, it appears the argument that the lack
of damage from wake turbulence does not prove that anything other than
a large commercial airliner hit the Pentagon on September 11 2001.

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